...the Department of Transportation will not keep secret the data we collect on birds striking airplanes. - Ray LaHood, United States Secretary of Transportation

From the dreaded mourning dove to the nefarious Canada goose to the humble armadillo, the FAA's recently released National Wildlife Strike Database ON-LINE contains information on aircraft/wildlife strikes from over 100,000 reported incidents between 1990 and 2008. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust on Apr 24, 2009 - 11 comments

20 Useful Visualization Libraries from the excellent A Beautiful WWW. Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Nov 6, 2008 - 11 comments

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches is a Smashing Magazine article examining a variety of increasingly popular or novel information visualization employed on modern websites.
posted by nthdegx on Aug 7, 2007 - 18 comments

"To determine whether a diagram is good or bad, one needs to determine for what context it was designed for." PingMag (1, 2) interviews Andrew Vande Moere of infosthetics . A quick, informative read which includes pretty pictures of some MeFi faves.
posted by oneirodynia on Apr 9, 2007 - 11 comments

A periodic table of visualization methods.
posted by fatllama on Jan 7, 2007 - 13 comments

Google's Crystal Ball::NYTimes. Quite interesting...Via TechDirt:

Google has created a predictive market system, basically a way for its employees to bet on the likelihood of possible events. Such markets have long been used to predict world events, like election results. Intrade, part of the Trade Exchange Network, allows people to bet on elections, stock market indexes and even the weather, for example.

I wonder how accurate the aggregated content of blogs would be to measure the likelihood of prospective real world events? The economist they consulted, Hal R. Varian, has some interesting links on his web page as well. I think that the internet better get their anti-spam technology up to par before we have people "gaming" the future through blogspam. For an explanation of Futures Markets (charts), see this page at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
posted by rzklkng on Sep 26, 2005 - 5 comments

The memespread project. How does a meme spread? What part does MetaFilter play in the process? [via waxy.org]
posted by cbrody on Apr 8, 2004 - 13 comments

Information deemed useful to terrorists is disappearing from government Web sites. I know this is old news, but this article details some of the specifics of whas has been happening. "The previous presumption, that publicly-funded information is the rightful property of the public until proven otherwise, has been replaced by the presumption that the public has to prove to a suspicious government that it deserves the information." I understand that as a nation we are hypersensitive now to terrorism, but isn't this just what the terrorists want? The loss of our freedoms to information?
posted by archimago on Dec 19, 2002 - 14 comments

"The Web, left to its own devices, would be the exact opposite of that: It's like a giant city with no neighborhoods; it needs these kind of meta-filters, these second-level kind of things, whether it is Yahoo or Google or Slashdot, to rein in that chaos and turn it to something more organized." From the second page of an interview with the author of Emergence, Steven Johnson (also co-founder of Feed).
posted by adrianhon on Nov 28, 2001 - 10 comments